I believe the term is materialist dialectic. And yeah, it’s utter horseshit.
It’s also the reason why many Marxists are Accelerationists. Fascism is seen as a necessary stepping stone between the destruction of the bourgeoisie democracy and the establishment of a proletariat ruled paradise.
But billionaires aren’t billionaires because of their personal contributions. They are almost always billionaires because they own a large company. And it’s certainly possible for a large company to contribute billions of dollars’ worth of utility to society.
It was one of MoviePass’s desperate attempts to avoid bankruptcy. Too bad (so sad) for them, they did it in 2020. That wasn’t the best year for movie goers and folks who market to them.
I am wrong about the black plague ending feudalism
Or
We are using two very different definitions of feudalism.
By my understanding, while democracy didn’t suddenly break out after the black plague, there were not enough serfs left alive to sustain the system. Instead of being worthless and very replaceable, humans who did labor were in great demand. Things changed.
if my understanding and definition are correct, anything that happened after the plague is not relevant.
It doesn’t matter if Lord Farquad is 2X richer than Johnny the Peasant, or 100X richer, or 10,000,000,000 richer. Under the social dynamics of Feudalism, Lord Farquad is a noble and Johnny is a peasant, and nothing can ever change that.
The measure of social status in our capitalist society is, in large part, wealth. But to compare the status of peasants and lords based only on how much wealth they controlled is myopic, because lords were free people with agency while serfs were bound to the land, barely more than property.
Even if Johnny Peasant accumulated wealth by moving to a town and becoming a merchant, he would never be the equal of a lord - even if the Lord was impoverished and Johnny was financing the king’s war.
That’s why, once the Burghers had enough influence, they pushed for the abolition of Feudalism.
You’re not producing anything of value, you’re just providing me with access to the facilities and raw materials which you acquired at some time in the past. If those facilities and raw materials were owned by the community, hats would still be produced and all the workers would be making $15 per hour. If hats go out of fashion, the community could democratically decide what to produce instead. The only thing that allows you to insert yourself into the process is that you have access to capital, and your workers don’t.
Capitalism is, literally, wage slavery. Sure, you can “freely choose” not to work for some particular capitalist, but if you don’t have substantial wealth of your own, you’re going to have to work for one of them. If you don’t want to take part in the system at all, you starve to death. (Of course, in advanced societies, you won’t actually starve to death, but that only indicates that those societies aren’t fully capitalist; democratic struggles have led to the passage of laws which partially ameliorate the cruelest features of capitalism).
By your standards, chattel slavery could be described as a “mutually beneficial relationship”. You pick cotton for me, and I won’t kill you. Win-win!
Feudalism, also known as the feudal system, was a combination of legal, economic, military, cultural, and political customs that flourished in medieval Europe from the 9th to 15th centuries.
And even so, it’s only the very top of the graph that is higher than the 2010 value, although of course I don’t know if the preceding was just a momentary dip. Still, it seems the income inequality is broadly comparable, and not a ‘much larger gap’ in feudalism, at least regarding the data we have.
It seems like @Half_Man_Half_Wit is saying, “the net worth of Elon Musk vs the net worth of his janitor is X; the net worth of a medieval king vs the net worth of a peasant is Y; X>Y; therefore inequality today is worse than inequality in the middle ages”.
But this is nonsense. Elon Musk can’t have his janitor executed for wearing clothes that Elon considers too fancy for a janitor; medieval kings did, at times, do exactly that.
Social status wasn’t based on wealth in the middle ages, so social inequality was far greater in the middle ages regardless of wealth inequality.
Also, if we are calculating the wealth of Jeff Bezos by including the value of Amazon, the company he controls, then when we calculate the wealth of the King of France we probably need to include not just the king’s personal estate but the value of everything under the control of the crown of France.
I agree with this. But let’s not ignore that there are two sides arguing otherwise. One side is arguing capitalism is morally bad. But there’s also a side that’s arguing capitalism is morally good. And both sides are wrong.
Capitalism is an economic system that works. That’s it. It has no inherent moral value and the results that capitalism produces are not going to be inherently good or inherently bad.
So, yes, we should reject arguments that say we should abolish capitalism because it is morally wrong.
But we should also reject arguments that say we should let capitalism be used without restrictions because anything that results from capitalism is good. This argument is just as nonsensical as the first one.
Capitalism needs to be regulated in order to keep it from being used in ways that harm society.
That wealth gap is at the very least not that much bigger than it is today.
But also regarding social mobility, things are far less clear-cut than one might assume. It’s rather difficult to track, but one approach is measuring the distribution of surnames as a proxy of whether there is any diffusion between classes. For England, this yields data going back to the 11th century, with rather less of a change than one might expect:
This implies that rates of social mobility in medieval England were as high as they
are now in England.
Anyway, I’m not interested in arguing that we’re no better off today than we were during feudal times. If I had to pick an era to live in between these two, I’d pick the present without hesitation. What is really worrisome isn’t necessarily where we are, but where we seem to be headed. Still, though, I find it intriguing that many of the ‘obvious’ benefits of our present age and economic system, on inspection, turn out to be more muddled than one might expect.
During the Great Depression, and for many decades afterwards, there was a widespread belief (which included many intellectuals) that the Depression was caused by “capitalism.” Today we know that’s not true; most economists today agree it was due to bad policies put forth by the Federal Reserve.
Capitalism is generally a good system, pretty compatible with democracy and the maintenance of civil liberties (someone WILL want to argue this point, please fuck off in advance) but left unchecked becomes toxic and exploitative to an unbearable degree.
Right now we’re seeing a lurch towards its worst elements, that of those benefiting the most using their wealth and power primarily to further increase their wealth and power with little consideration for the rest of us.
Elon Musk has $400 billion with which to purchase legislation for his own personal benefit. Our votes are increasingly powerless to compete with that and it’s getting later all the time.
I’m inclined to agree with this. And somehow the likes of Musk seems to have convinced a lot of regular people that they (the Oligarchs) aren’t the problem. If that doesn’t change we may be in trouble.
You are not addressing the point at all, because the gap between a king, a lord, a burgher, and a peasant had very little to do with how many gold coins each of them had. And when that became more important, Feudalism ended, because as a system it relied on the inherent, insurmountable gap between the mobility and the peasantry.
Maybe what was meant was a gap in power, but the way it was framed was in terms of wealth, which, not being able to read people’s minds, is what I addressed.